The Master of Confessions (29 page)

On December 23, 1975, he announced that he was flying back to Phnom Penh via Beijing:

On Christmas day, Phung Ton—along with a number of other Cambodian intellectuals, including Chao Seng, another renowned professor—landed in Phnom Penh. They had barely set foot on the ground when they were taken off to different camps. One year later, on December 12, 1976, Phung Ton was transferred to the prison from which there was no return: S-21. In the photo taken of him upon his arrival, he has the number 17 hanging around his neck like some kind of poacher's snare. He's wearing a shirt with thin stripes. He must have been the seventeenth person to have been registered at S-21 that month.

“My father looks unrecognizable and emaciated. His eyes are empty,” says his daughter, showing the court the photo, the last visual trace of her father's existence.

It's estimated that a prisoner at S-21 lasted two months on average before being executed. The professor was held in his cell for at least seven. On July 6, 1977, a medical examination sheet, or at least what passed for one, recorded that Phung Ton was unresponsive, that he was suffering from diarrhea and renal failure, and that he was underweight. After that, his name disappears from the archives. His family believes that he died the day after the medical report was made. There's no record of his interrogations during the preceding months. A mere four sheets of paper concerning him have been found in the center's archives, constituting the first draft of a “biography.” Those pages were written by Mam Nai.

DUCH'S PROBLEM ISN'T REPUDIATING
the Party or Communism, or expressing regret for the purges or the merciless discipline, or reconciling with the three survivors of S-21. His problem is getting over his betrayal. Professor Phung Ton is one of a handful of individuals (Professor Chao Seng is another) whose executions at S-21 Duch finds especially troubling. The man has grown an impenetrable plate of armor against human emotion, yet the mere mention of Phung Ton's name can pierce it in a fraction of a second. To purge members of the army or members of the Party in the name of discipline or loyalty is one thing; but how does one justify the murder of a much-admired and harmless university professor, one who had the courage of his progressive convictions and whose only sin was to come home to his family? Duch struggles with it, even in the context of class warfare. The wound left by the murder of Phung Ton was opened at the very start of the trial and hasn't stopped bleeding, to the point that the professor seems to have become the victim around which Duch's fate is to be symbolically decided. Phung Ton represents everything we demand to know about this period, and on which hangs the possibility for the families to forgive Duch, as well as his impossible redemption. The professor's fate was the result not of violent, fratricidal purges but of a murderous ideology. That his daughter and widow show up in court every day without fail turns his fate into an emblem of Cambodia's tragic past.

IT'S JUNE 16, 2009.
The trial has been going for two and a half months. Duch has spent many intense hours on the stand, testifying about the years before S-21, about Communist Party policies, about the establishment of the prison. Always self-possessed, and often in control of proceedings, Duch shows remarkable fortitude up until the morning when the court discusses the fate of Professor Phung Ton.

Duch starts to sob, the emotion twisting the features of his face. He tries to fight it, tries to fend off these waves of emotion that he usually keeps at bay, but they assail him like seawater pounding a sandstone cliff. Only when the presiding judge asks a series of confused and disjointed questions does Duch get some breathing space. Roux is on the edge of his seat. He doesn't take his eyes off of his anguished client.

“We—and this is particularly true in Western thinking—we expect those who have committed crimes against humanity to manifest some kind of culpability,” says the psychologist. “There are various ways it can express itself: as a very serious depression, for example, or suicidal tendencies, or tears. Many show no guilt. But for those that do, this is how it comes out.”

All the civil parties have left the courtroom. Duch tries to keep his answers to the bare minimum: “That's wrong,” “That's not true.” He knows that only by economizing his words can he stop himself from falling into the abyss of emotion that he has so carefully kept at bay for four decades. His voice has changed and he sounds slightly hoarse. The man who could modulate his voice at will now has trouble speaking. The man who dominated proceedings, who controlled, accepted, or rejected such and such an argument with irritating but masterful authority is now struggling to prevent his chest from being ripped open. His lawyer, Maître Roux, keeps his eyes fixed on his client. The lawyer remains perfectly still, his hands joined together under his chin and half-covering his mouth, as tense as a lookout atop a mast. He looks as though he's projecting all his energy toward his wretched client. The questions no longer matter; the facts, the details about the torture, all that has become background noise. Duch is drowning.

But he makes it through.

It takes him forty minutes to regain his composure, and even then, he's still fragile. In the afternoon, the court raises the issue of the medical experiments carried out at S-21. Duch's subordinates, Suor Thi and Prak Khan, talked about them in court. There are mentions of them in the archives. Yet Duch disputes at least some of the facts. Presiding Judge Nil Nonn asks the defendant if he was aware of these experiments.

“Yes, I was,” says Duch, his voice calm.

Duch has composed himself, but his conscience gives up some ground. A hundred detainees died drained of their blood, he says. The practice only ended after the medical staff was purged; that is, when the only people competent to carry out this lethal bloodletting were killed themselves. No one had been trained to replace them.

Pharmaceutical drugs were also tested on the prisoners. Duch maintains that the prisoners were aware that they were participating in an experiment. He admits to having been personally involved. But then he tells a preposterous story: he claims to have secretly opened dozens of capsules containing the test medicine, thrown it out, cleaned the capsules with cotton buds and replaced their contents with acetaminophen, thus saving his human guinea pigs from death, he recounts to an incredulous and repulsed audience.

“ACCEPTANCE IS A PROCESS,”
says the psychologist in court.

“In this process from denial to self-incrimination, can certain obstacles remain? Things that are so difficult to bear that the subject cannot bring himself to say them out loud?” asks Roux.

Some parts of Duch's conscience shifted on that day in June. His confession no longer holds water. The man seems exhausted, spent after a long, frenzied journey from confession to confession, from setback to defeat. The morning's discussion of Professor Phung Ton left him shattered; in the afternoon, he confessed to a crime that he had never before acknowledged then talked wildly about the unlikely covert steps he took to stop the medical experiments on prisoners. His posture and his tone of voice have changed. He'd never looked as energetic and confident as he had the previous week; now his face looks haggard. “Heavy. Heavy and serious,” Roux confides to me that night.

One name threw Duch off his game: Phung Ton. The trial's mysterious, uncontrollable force seems to be at work.

Yet it won't happen again. There will be other times during the trial when Duch will be confronted by his own emotions or by the truth, but he will never again let himself fall apart the way he did today. He won't make any further admissions; he'll go back to being master of his own confessions.

AGAINST ALL THE EVIDENCE,
Duch denies knowing that the professor was a prisoner at S-21.

“I respected him. Had I known he was there, I would have given him my support, even if he was supposed to be smashed, since that was the procedure. I didn't betray the professor's soul, and I ask for forgiveness for his soul,” he says, falling apart.

The professor's daughter sits ramrod-straight, a red scarf wrapped around her neck, and looks unblinkingly at Duch. Duch is adamant that Phung Ton wasn't tortured and that he died of an illness, not a blow to the back of the head and a knife across his throat. Yet when Him Huy takes the stand, there's a tremor in Duch's voice as he implores his former henchman: “You know what happened to the professor. Was he executed at S-21 or at Choeung Ek? Please, be honest . . .”

But, of course, it's hopeless. For Him Huy, a young soldier with no education, Phung Ton was just a number or a name on a list on which there were so many to check off.

There's little doubt Mam Nai knows more than anyone. He was in charge of interrogating the professor, who had been his mentor. Even worse: the professor's father-in-law, the dean of the Pedagogical Institute, had taken the young Mam Nai under his wing.

The prosecutor is the first to try to learn more about Phung Ton's fate. Without difficulty and with impeccable poise, Mam Nai immediately boxes him into a corner: “I don't remember interrogating Phung Ton. It's not coming back to me.”

Silke Studzinsky, the lawyer representing the professor's family, doesn't do any better.

“I knew him, but I don't remember having interrogated him at S-21. I just don't remember” is the old Communist's unwavering reply. If the archives hadn't been kept so meticulously, or if they had been destroyed as they had been elsewhere, then Mam Nai's answers would be the end of it. The family would never know where the professor disappeared. Duch and Mam Nai could've denied the professor was ever even at S-21.

But there's that photo and those four sheets of paper with Mam Nai's writing on them. Faced with irrefutable evidence, Mam Nai grudgingly acknowledges that he drafted the professor's confession. Someone reads a paragraph out loud. Duch, a hand over his chin, looks at the screen on which the document is displayed. The conclusion reached by Mam Nai at the time was that the professor agreed with Communism. Now he has nothing to say about it. He reminds the court that once a person had been arrested and sent to S-21, that person had to disappear.

The defense lawyers manage to get a bit more out of him. With much effort, Mam Nai finally admits: “I carried out the interrogation. But no one made him confess. It was the same with Professor Chao Seng. They both spoke from their hearts.”

“Thirty years later, how do you view that period in your life?” asks Roux.

“Can you be more specific? Are you talking about the current regime, or the previous one?”

“What do you think of Democratic Kampuchea?”

“Back then, there was nothing to eat. That was because of the war. But there were also positives: independence, self-control, self-sufficiency.”

“Do you know how many people were killed at S-21?”

“My job and my position meant that I couldn't know that kind of thing.”

“Do you know how many people died in Democratic Kampuchea?”

“I know even less about that. I just don't know.”

“Do you regret having been an interrogator at S-21?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Do you have any regrets today about having been an interrogator at S-21?”

“Yes, I have regrets.”

“Can you tell us about them?”

“I believe that there were good people at S-21, and that wrongdoing took place there. But from what I saw, there were fewer good people than bad. I have regrets for that small group of good people.”

“You have no regrets for the ‘less good' people who were smashed?”

“I have never regretted the deaths of bad people.”

I
T'S A DICEY SITUATION FOR DUCH.
If he stands up for Mam Nai, it could be held against him; people might not believe he's telling the truth, despite his promise. If he sells out his former colleague, on the other hand, he betrays a loyal subordinate who, up to this point, he has appeared eager to protect.